


may you be in Heaven before the Devil knows you're dead

by nuricurry



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Post-Canon, References to Depression, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:18:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22190128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nuricurry/pseuds/nuricurry
Summary: Surely there's a better way to live, but Eiji hasn't found it. Or, rather, hasn't found a reason to try. And so he grieves and lies about it, and then grieves and lies again. The cycle continues.
Relationships: Ash Lynx/Okumura Eiji, Okumura Eiji/Sing Soo-Ling
Comments: 3
Kudos: 45





	may you be in Heaven before the Devil knows you're dead

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gravy_tape](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gravy_tape/gifts).



He’s a liar.

He had begun to suspect that about himself years ago, after he came back to New York and started the process of getting his green card. 

_There are better employment opportunities here,_ he tells the lady at the immigration office, _I’ve made a lot of connections in New York. It’d help my work._

“You’re not doing this because of someone here, are you?” she asks, because she’s paid to be suspicious. 

When Eiji smiles and says _no_ , he lies through his teeth.

Seven years later, he realizes he’s lying again when he looks at Sing and tells him that he’s learned to be happy with how things are, and that there’s no reason for him to think that Eiji is miserable. But, to his credit, he doesn’t realize it’s a lie until after Akira leaves, and then it’s him and Sing in the apartment with the giant portrait of Ash sitting in the living room. The gallery show ended, and they gave Eiji all his pieces back. Ash sits in their living room, seventeen and facing the Manhattan sunset and every day they have to look at it.

Sing offered to put it in his closet. Eiji refused, because he had the gut reaction to protect Ash from being locked up in the dark, hidden away, like he was so often as a child.

So it sits across from the couch and Eiji can’t sleep.

“Will you at least think about a support group?”

He does it because he wants Jessica and Max off his back. He does it so that he can look at Sing and smile and make it seem like he’s moving forward, that he’s really trying now, things are sure to get better because he’s making an attempt. But he only attends twice. 

_Hi, I’m Sarah_ , and an echo of hellos sounds like some morbid choir, _I lost my mom last Christmas,_ and people clicking their tongues and shaking their heads in sympathy feels so foreign to him because of course he feels bad for Sarah and her mom having cancer but when she talks about the chemo all he can think about is Ash’s hair reflecting gold in the sunlight of Cape Cod and the smell of his breath first thing in the morning. 

_My name is Manuel, my little brother got shot_ gets him choked up and he even reaches over to place a hand on Manuel’s knee, but by the time he starts talking about the gang violence and the way that their father cries at night, Eiji is remembering what it felt like to have Ash’s hands over his as he taught him how to fire a gun. There’s only so much he can take and only so selfish he can be to be thinking about his own grief when he’s supposed to be supporting others, so he chokes down the burnt coffee and the stale cookies two times before he stops trying. The Thursday nights he should be going to a church basement he instead uses as time to wander around Brooklyn, taking photos of bodega cats and greasy food carts. 

God, how did he compete competitively in track? He can’t even commit to grief counseling. 

His weight fluctuates between skinny and scary, entirely dependant on how many meals a day Sing can make himself present for. Michael brings nachos and pizza and burgers to the gallery and to Eiji’s apartment but it’s all too easy to let a teenage boy gorge himself on all of it while only sparing a few bites, just enough for him to report back to his parents that _sure, of course Eiji is eating, we split a whole box of chicken between us._

Sing knows better because Sing will watch every bite that he takes, will count and tally and file the information away so that he can bring it up when Eiji loses another two pounds and his shirt hangs loosely off one shoulder. Sing packs the fridge full of protein shakes and liquid meal replacements, not because he likes them but because maybe if he doesn’t have to chew anything maybe Eiji can actually swallow some calories. He’s seen Eiji vomit one too many times, and maybe the shakes will finally be the one thing that Eiji can keep down. 

He has to eat because of the antidepressants. Doctor’s orders. Specific warnings against taking the pills without. Which is unfortunate because that just gives him something to vomit up later. The Prozac makes him exhausted, it makes him nauseous, and it makes him take forever to get off. Sing will blow him, jerk him off, even ride him, and he still won’t be able to finish because his brain is in another place from his dick, his head is clouded and muddy and sure he can get hard but that sometimes feels like that’s all he can do. 

Sing is more patient about the whole thing than Eiji deserves. He says he doesn’t mind, he talks about things like journeys and not destinations but that’s shit you say to the guy who can’t come after the third handjob and you’ve given yourself carpal tunnel. So they stop trying to get Eiji to finish because it isn’t going to happen. Instead, he focuses on Sing and how he feels, and what he needs, and that is enough. It has to be enough.

He can’t help but still think of Ash.

He’ll have Sing’s dick in his mouth and he’ll have Ash on his mind. Like some fucked up threesome, when they have sex it’s him, Sing, and a ghost. 

That felt even truer the time they fucked in the hallway between the living room and the bedrooms. He had Sing bent over the couch, they were both drunk and horny and oh so sad. It was the ninth anniversary, it was nine years since Ash had died, and Eiji was actively trying to forget he was gone, that he even existed. But as he bent Sing over, and shifted his hips, he saw Ash’s photo across from them, he saw Ash’s blonde hair and his sad eyes and the way his wrists were boney and thin. As he looked at him and fucked Sing, Eiji felt like he was being watched by those eyes, dark green and full of pity. Later, when Sing asked him what was different, why he was finally able to get off, he lied to him again and said that he didn’t know. After that, he was the one who put the photo of Ash into the office and did his best to avoid it.

Sing hates going to Cape Cod because in a strange way Ash is more present there than when they're in the city. Eiji needs to go there for the exact same reason. He bought the old house from the bank, the house that used to belong to Ash's family but now belongs to him. The house is full of ghosts that linger in doorways and peer in windows.

"This place creeps me out," Sing says, shivering and anxious. For a moment he looks like he did when he was fourteen, small and vulnerable and more attitude than muscle. It makes Eiji laugh, just for a second, because Sing is now none of those things. He's big and capable, and he doesn't run his mouth as much anymore now that he doesn't have something to prove.

"There's nothing to be scared of," Eiji says, but he knows that he's lying. There's plenty to be afraid of, like the leftover sneakers in the closet, or the tshirt that Eiji keeps in a drawer so that he can pull it out when he tries to sleep and needs something that smells like Ash, even a little bit. Bottles of shampoo that are ten years old sit half-empty in the bathtub and Eiji refuses to throw away the final, unopened can of Coke from the fridge, the one that Ash playfully threatened to kill over if anyone drank it after he saved it specifically for himself. 

Sing is right to be afraid of the presence possessing the house in Cape Cod but Eiji refuses to perform an exorcism. Part of it is stubbornness, the other part is nostalgia. But what stops him the most is fear; fear that if he lets go of Cape Cod, he will be letting go of Ash. Fear that by moving on he puts himself into a place to be where he is no longer the person Ash loved. If he changes, he might turn into someone that would have never gotten to know Ash the way that he did. He fears change because Ash can no longer change with him and he has lost so much of him already. He can’t keep losing what little pieces of him remains, so he tries to stay the same person he was when he was nineteen, despite how impossible that is.

At least not everything about him changes as the years creep by.

It always surprises people when they see his scar. Most don’t recognize it; when he took off his shirt while painting her china cabinet, Mrs. Coleman from upstairs thought it was a surgical scar. She wasn’t necessarily wrong, though she did assume the surgery in question was getting his appendix removed, not a bullet. 

Sing knew what it was, where it came from. Sing touched that scar like it was some sort of ancient hieroglyphs, as if by reading them, translating them, he could learn how to undo all of Eiji’s damage. 

He doesn’t tell Sing about the hospital. About the last time he saw Ash. He doesn’t tell him about how Ash once touched that scar that wasn’t yet a scar in the exact same way. He doesn’t tell Sing that Ash wished that he knew how to fix Eiji and it killed him, he doesn’t tell him that he’s afraid the same thing will one day happen to him, because Eiji simply isn’t meant to be fixable. 

“Let’s go to California,” Sing suggests and that’s when Eiji knows he’s running out of ideas. “We can try San Francisco. I hear it’s sorta like New York.”

He tries to find a solution that he thinks will make Eiji happy. He tries to find a middle ground that won’t keep killing him. Cities are cities, one can argue, they’re all full of people and full of distractions and full of noise. Maybe the rumors about California are true and people are nicer there, maybe with Chinatown and Fisherman’s Wharf they can trick their brains into seeing things as more familiar than they are. It’d be different, but that could be what is needed; it would be better to move somewhere without so many memories, somewhere that isn’t choking them with a noose named Ash.

But they aren’t going anywhere, Eiji knows that. They’re both creatures of habit, both the sort of people who will poke at a sore in their mouth with their tongue until it bleeds. That’s what life is just sort of like for them now; an open wound they keep poking at while it festers.

He’d be a liar to claim otherwise.


End file.
